“You were told to stand down, Mr. Bosch,” he said. “You were told rather explicitly to leave things alone and yet here we are.”
“Can you answer a question?”
“I can try. If it’s not classified.”
“Is my watch classified? Where’s my watch? It was given to me when I retired and I want it back.”
“Mr. Bosch, forget about your watch for now. I am trying to get something through that thick skull of yours but you don’t want it to get through, do you?”
He reached down for his coffee and took a sip. He grimaced as he burned his mouth. He put the cup back down on the floor.
“More important things are at work here than your private investigation and your hundred-dollar retirement watch.”
I put a look of surprise on my face.
“You really think that’s all they spent on me after all those years?”
Peoples frowned and shook his head.
“You are not helping yourself here, Mr. Bosch. You are compromising an investigation that is vitally significant to this country and here all you want to do is show how clever you are.”
“This is the national security rap, right? It is, isn’t it? Well, Special Agent Peoples, you can hang on to it for next time. I don’t consider a murder investigation to be unimportant. There are no compromises when it comes to murder.”
Peoples stood up and stepped toward me until he was looking directly down at me. He leaned over the bed, putting his hand against the wall for support.
“Hieronymus Bosch,” he yelled, actually pronouncing it correctly. “You are trespassing! You are driving the wrong way down a one-way street! Do you understand!”
He then turned and went back to his chair. I almost laughed at the theatrics and for a moment thought that he did not realize that I had spent twenty-five years working in rooms like these.
“Am I getting through to you at all?” Peoples said, his voice calm once again. “You are not a cop. You carry no badge. You have no provenance, no case. You have no standing.”
“It used to be a free country. That used to be enough standing.”
“It’s not the same country it used to be. Things have changed.”
He proffered the file held in his hand.
“The murder of this woman is important. Of course it is. But there are other things at play here. More important matters. You must step back from it, Mr. Bosch. This is the final warning. Stand down. Or we will stand you down. And you won’t like it.”
“I bet I’ll end up back here? Right? With Mouse and the others? The other enemy combatants. Isn’t that what you call them? Does anyone even know about this place, Agent Peoples? Anyone outside your own little BAM squad?”
He seemed momentarily taken aback by my knowledge and use of the term.
“I recognized Mouse when they brought me in. I was window shopping.”
“And from that you think you know what goes on here?”
“You’re working the guy. It’s obvious and that’s fine. But what if he’s the one who killed Angella Benton? What if he killed the bank security man? And what if he killed an FBI agent, too? Don’t you care about what happened to Martha Gessler? She was one of your own. Has the world changed that much? Is a special agent no longer special under these new rules of yours? Or does the line change according to convenience? Am I an enemy combatant, Agent Peoples?”
I could see it hurt. My words opened an old wound if not an old debate. But then a resolve came across his face. He opened the file in his hands and took out the printout I had made at the library. I could see the mugshot of Aziz.
“How did you know about this? How did you make this connection?”
“You people.”
“What are you talking about? No one here would tell you -”
“They didn’t have to. I saw your man tailing me in the library. Make a note of that-he’s not that good. Tell him to try Sports Illustrated next time. I knew something was up so I ran a search through the newspaper files and came up with that. I printed it out because I knew it might flush you people out. And it did. Your kind are very predictable.
“Anyway, then I saw Mouse when they were walking me down the hall and I sort of put things together. Money from my robbery was under the seat of his car when you arrested him. But you don’t care about that or